The Fillmore Community Action Plan responds to one of the most documented cases of government-sanctioned displacement in American urban history. This site explains what happened, what the plan proposes, and why it matters.
Before 1940, fewer than 5,000 Black residents lived in all of San Francisco. World War II changed that almost overnight. Federal war production drew tens of thousands of Black workers from the Deep South to Bay Area shipyards and munitions plants — families leaving behind sharecropping, tenant farming, and racial terror for the promise of stable wages on the West Coast.
Because most of San Francisco's housing was closed to Black residents by law, custom, and discrimination, the Western Addition became the one neighborhood where Black families could build. And build they did. By 1950, the neighborhood held 15,000 Black residents. By 1970, roughly 96,000 Black San Franciscans lived in the city — 13.5% of the population. The Fillmore corridor had 300 to 400 Black-owned businesses: jazz clubs, beauty schools, restaurants, bookstores, insurance companies, churches, hotels. Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and John Coltrane performed here. The neighborhood had its own economy, its own civic life, and its own identity. People called it the Harlem of the West.
"We slowed the agency down, but in the end, urban renewal became what we feared it would: it became black removal."
In 1956, the city approved the Western Addition Redevelopment Project — the first federally funded urban renewal project in San Francisco. In 1959, Mayor George Christopher appointed M. Justin Herman to lead the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. What followed was, by multiple historical accounts, the most devastating urban renewal program in United States history.
Two-lane Geary Street was widened into a four-lane boulevard that cut the neighborhood in two. Sixty city blocks were demolished. Approximately 13,000 residents were displaced in the second phase alone. 883 businesses were closed. 5,000 homes were destroyed. The displaced were offered Certificates of Preference — a formal acknowledgment that the city owed them a way back. Only 4% of those original certificates were ever used.
When the reconstruction was complete, the community was gone. The residents had moved — some to other neighborhoods, many out of the city. The businesses had closed for good. The intergenerational wealth that homeownership would have built was extinguished. And a neighborhood that had constructed something extraordinary under conditions of severe constraint was left as a corridor of parking lots and deferred promises.
The FCAP is a partnership between the City of San Francisco and community members — structured around a Steering Committee of community leaders, organized through public workshops, and grounded in the documented history of what was built here and what was taken. It covers four topic areas: Health, Housing, Economic & Workforce Development, and Placemaking, Arts & Culture. The draft strategies were developed through community workshops held between April and June 2026.
This is not the first plan proposed for the Fillmore. What distinguishes the FCAP is its explicit grounding in the community's history and its insistence on community self-determination rather than city-directed development. The plan frames the work as ongoing repair — not charity, not investment, not revitalization. Repair.
Five strategy documents were developed through community workshops and agency consultation. Each one addresses a specific dimension of a harm that is interconnected. Select a topic area to see what the community is asking for.
The health disparities facing Black San Franciscans today are not random. They are the documented consequence of displacement, poverty, and chronic stress — conditions directly produced by Urban Renewal. Black San Franciscans are hospitalized for cardiovascular disease at 3–6 times the rate of all other groups. Diabetes hospitalization and death rates are 2–3 times higher. Black maternal health outcomes are among the worst in the city.
The Health strategies address this by moving care into the community rather than asking the community to come to institutions that have historically failed them. Barbershops, salons, faith organizations, and housing sites become health infrastructure. The food access strategies respond directly to the food desert the Fillmore became when its grocery ecosystem was destroyed by redevelopment — calling for a full-service grocery store with cooperative ownership, rather than simply recruiting a national chain.
Urban Renewal didn't just take homes — it destroyed the community structures that supported health: the neighborhood economy that provided income, the social networks that reduced isolation, and the local food infrastructure that sustained families. Health strategy here is inseparable from economic and housing strategy.
Read the Draft Health Strategies ↗Housing is where the harm is most directly documented — and where the city has the clearest legal and moral obligation. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency displaced thousands of Black families, seized property at below-market rates, and offered a Certificate of Preference as remedy. Only 4% of original certificates were ever used. Today, an estimated 50,000 descendants of displaced Western Addition and Hunters Point families are potentially eligible — but only a few hundred have been reached.
The Housing strategies address this through five areas: anti-displacement, access and navigation, homeownership and intergenerational wealth-building, preservation of existing affordable housing, and equitable new production. The COP Descendant Program expansion is one of the most direct remedies proposed anywhere in the plan — it connects the present directly to the documented obligation created in 1967.
When Lynette Mackey's family was displaced from two Fillmore homes in 1975, they received $28,000 — displacing more than 18 people. Those homes today would be worth several million dollars. The intergenerational wealth loss is not hypothetical. It is measurable, and it is ongoing.
Read the Draft Housing Strategies ↗The Fillmore had 300–400 Black-owned businesses before Urban Renewal. Urban Renewal closed 883 businesses across both phases. The community that had built a self-sustaining local economy — one where residents spent money with each other, where young people found work and training in neighborhood establishments, where wealth circulated locally — was dismantled in less than two decades.
The Economic Development strategies focus on the Fillmore corridor: filling commercial vacancies with businesses that have cultural relevance and community roots, providing technical assistance and capital access across the full business cycle, and building toward cooperative economic governance through merchant associations and community benefit districts. The explicit prioritization of Black-owned businesses is not incidental — it is the plan's acknowledgment of who was displaced and who the investment is for.
The pre-redevelopment Fillmore economy wasn't a corridor — it was a neighborhood ecosystem of interdependent businesses, mutual patronage, and community ownership. The question the plan is implicitly asking is whether that ecosystem can be rebuilt, and at what scale.
Read the Draft Economic Development Strategies ↗When Urban Renewal closed the Fillmore's businesses, it eliminated an entire informal employment and apprenticeship system. The jazz clubs, barbershops, beauty schools, and restaurants were not just cultural institutions — they were employers and training grounds. The young people who would have learned a trade or built a career in that neighborhood economy instead faced a labor market with no pathways built for them.
The Workforce strategies take a broad view of who needs support, naming foster youth, justice-involved youth, undocumented youth, and disconnected transitional-age youth as specific populations — a recognition that workforce barriers in the Western Addition compound in particular ways for particular people. The strategies also explicitly address barriers to City employment and civil service pathways, which have historically been a route to the Black middle class but have become increasingly inaccessible.
Arts workforce pathways are explicitly included — a recognition that the Fillmore's cultural economy was a real employment system, not just a backdrop. Musicians, promoters, venue operators, and sound technicians were workers. Rebuilding that system requires investment, not just programming.
Read the Draft Workforce Development Strategies ↗Urban Renewal didn't only destroy buildings. It destroyed the physical expression of a community's identity — the spaces where people gathered, performed, mourned, organized, and passed culture to the next generation. The Victorian houses demolished, the jazz clubs bulldozed, the churches relocated: these were the architecture of Black civic life in San Francisco, and they were gone within a generation.
The Placemaking strategies are the most expansive of the five documents, covering arts and culture, neighborhood identity, public space, transit, public safety, and the activation of key sites. The framing of Black art as an economic driver — not just a cultural amenity — is a deliberate distinction. Memory walks, interpretive signage, and community murals address the physical erasure of cultural memory. The public safety section is notably community-centered: ambassadors, conflict mediation, and mental health responders rather than expanded policing.
The Fillmore Heritage Center — built as a cultural anchor after redevelopment — has operated for years with chronic underfunding and institutional instability. This plan's call to invest in cultural infrastructure is not aspirational. It is a response to what already exists and has been left to struggle.
Read the Draft Placemaking, Arts & Culture Strategies ↗The five strategy documents represent a serious, historically grounded effort to address documented harm. Several things stand out across the full plan — and several realities about scale and structure deserve honest acknowledgment.
Racially specific language — Black-owned businesses, Black cultural institutions, Black households — appears throughout. Racially neutral framing in community development has historically allowed resources to flow away from the communities that need them most. This plan resists that pattern.
The Certificate of Preference appears across Housing and Economic Development as a thread between the redevelopment era and today. It is the city's formal acknowledgment that it owes a specific remedy to a specific population — and anchoring the FCAP to that obligation grounds it in something the city has already accepted.
Framing Black art as an economic driver — not a charitable investment in culture — reflects a historically accurate understanding of what the Fillmore was. The jazz economy, the cultural businesses, the community institutions: these were economic infrastructure, and rebuilding them requires economic investment.
Health outcomes cannot improve without housing stability. Economic development cannot take root without workforce pathways. The five documents were developed through separate workshops — the community will need to hold them together as a system, not as five independent programs.
The 2023 AARAC Reparations Report called for multi-million dollar investments in Black business ownership and community infrastructure. The FCAP strategies are directionally correct — but corridor activation and technical assistance alone cannot close the gap between what was taken and what is being offered.
An estimated 50,000 people are eligible for the Certificate of Preference. Only a few hundred have been reached. And approximately 67% of available COP-eligible units require incomes that most eligible families don't have. Better outreach can't fix a remedy that leads to a door most people can't open.
The full analysis — including historical context, detailed strategy summaries, comparative findings, and guiding questions for the committee — is available to FCAP Steering Committee members and invited stakeholders.